Problems in Gender Studies
Winter 2011
Monday and Wednesday 1:30-2:50
WB 130
GNDR 10100,ENGL 10200,HUMA 22800,SOSC 28200, HIST 29306
Prof. Leora Auslander
Harper Memorial West, 608
Email: lausland@uchicago.edu
Office Hours: Thursdays, 3:005:00pm (Sign-up sheet to left of door
to suite on 6th floor.)
Ms. Erin Moore
Center for Gender Studies 104
5733 S. University Ave.
Email: emoore@uchicago.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 4-6:30
pm (via Starfish)
This section of “Problems in Gender Studies” will use an intensive exploration of the
practices of “home-making” to address the intersection of gender, race, politics,
migration, economy, and reproduction in modernity. Topics to be covered include: late
19th century feminist visions critiques of “home” and their visions of the ideal alternatives
(including collective and kitchenless dwellings); the concept of the home-front during
WWI and its consequences; the gendered patterns and experiences of migration, that is of
leaving one home and attempting to make another; postwar/coldwar homemaking in the
1950s and its critique of the 1960s, including squatting movements; and, finally, women
making other women’s homes – the politics of domestic service.
Materials will include theoretical and empirical texts, fiction, newspaper articles,
advertisements, political tracts, websites, film, and legislation.
Texts are available on Reserve at Regenstein Library and on the course’s chalk-site.
Goals:
1) Introduction to some of the key concepts and texts in gender analysis.
2) Opportunity to reflect on "home" as an analytic category.
3) Improved ability to analyze theoretical and empirical scholarship and their
relationship to social/political change.
4) Improved capacities for written and oral presentation of ideas and intellectual
debate.
Requirements:
The requirements have been designed to enable you to meet those goals. They have,
furthermore, been designed for a course whose success or failure depends on the quality
of your preparation for classroom discussion.
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1) Reading for class. We have kept the assigned readings modest enough (between
50 and 90 pages per class meeting) in order for you to actively read. That is, we
expect that you will have read the text(s) through, thought about them, and taken
notes. You will find guidelines for effective reading and note-taking on the
course's chalk site.
2) Film viewing. The films are required. One will be shown in class. Evening
viewing sessions will be arranged for the others, or you may see them on your
own.
3) Class Participation: While it is not required that you speak at every class
session, it is required that you come to each class prepared to both speak and
listen. Participation will be noted and graded.
4) Two short papers. You will be offered a choice of topics based on the class
readings. The first will be 3 pages long, the second 5. They will be based on the
readings for class. Guidelines for successful papers will be posted on the Chalk
site. The instructors will not be able to read drafts of these papers, nor will you be
allowed to re-write them for an improved grade.
5) Group project: presentation and paper. Each student will sign up for one
group project, resulting in 6 groups of four to five people each. Each group will
select material related to the theme of the day upon which they will present and
make a 15 minute presentation to the class. Limited research beyond the readings
for the course will be required for this assignment. Each group will also write a
paper based on their investigations. Successful presentations and papers will,
however, emerge from collective, real-time, face-to-face, discussions. Groups
will meet with one of the instructors two weeks before their presentation to
discuss content and presentation and writing strategy. The groups should come
prepared with materials and ideas for those meetings. It is expected that everyone
will speak and groups may choose write collectively (and share a grade) or to
identify individual authors (and be graded individually for this part of the
assignment) for sections of their written reports. Guidelines for successful
presentations and papers will be posted on the chalk site.
A SIGN-UP SHEET WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE COURSE'S CHALK
SITE AT 10PM ON JANUARY 3 (AFTER THE FIRST CLASS MEETING).
NO GROUP MAY HAVE MORE THAN 5 MEMBERS.
Due Dates:
Paper 1: Sunday, January 30, 5pm (Prompts will be posted on January 23rd.)
Paper 2: Monday, March 7, 5pm (Prompts will be posted on February 28th.)
Presentation papers: Presentation papers for each group will be due by 10pm one week
after the class presentation.
All papers should be submitted via the Chalk drop box. Please do not submit the papers
at the last minute since there may be technical problems with Chalk. Leave yourselves a
window.
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We do not anticipate accepting late papers. If, however, it becomes impossible for you
get a paper in on time, you MUST email BOTH instructors explaining the situation
BEFORE the deadline for submission. Bad conjunctures (papers due at the same time in
many courses) will not be an acceptable excuse. We will hand out topics at least a week
before the papers are due giving you adequate time-management options.
We will not be reading drafts of papers, but please feel free to sign up for office hours
with either (or both) of the instructors to discuss the material.
Grading:
Short paper 1: 20%
Short paper 2: 30%
Class Participation: 20%
Collective Presentation: 15%
Collective Paper: 15%
Notes on Participation Grades:
“A” – a student will attend class almost always (at most 2 absences) and make frequent
contributions that reflect an excellent understanding of the assigned materials, attentive
listening to others.
“B” -- a student will attend class almost always (at most 2 absences) and make frequent
contributions that reflect a good understanding of the assigned materials, attentive
listening to others.
“C” -- a student will attend class almost always (at most 2 absences), but infrequently or
never contribute OR will attend sporadically (more than 3 absences) but make good
contributions when s/he does.
“D”—a student will have sporadic attendance (more than 3 absences) and make
infrequent and ill-informed contributions.
“F”—a student will have sporadic attendance (more than 3 absences) and will never
contribute or will not contribute usefully to the discussion.
If you do not feel comfortable participating spontaneously in class discussion please
discuss this with me immediately; we will figure out another solution. Please also note
that this is not a license to dominate the classroom, nor to intervene when you have not
been able to get to the reading.
Computers:
The use of laptops will not be allowed in this class; they are not needed and are a
distraction to all.
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Monday, Jan. 3: Introduction
Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Variations on a Theme” in her On Female Body
Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,,
1990), pp. 123-145.
Wednesday, Jan. 5: Separate Spheres?
Bonnie Smith, chapter 1 in her Ladies of the Leisure Class (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1981) pp. 3-17
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Homemade Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity,
and Colonialism in South Africa," in Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed. African Encounters
with Domesticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), pp. 37-74
Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13: 1 (2002): 7795.
Monday, Jan. 10: Colliding spheres
Joan Jensen, “Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women’s Household production for the
Market,” Review of Radical Political Economics 12: 2 (1980): 14-24.
Moira Donald, “Tranquil havens? Critiquing the idea of home as the middle-class
sanctuary.” In Domestic Space: Reading the nineteenth-century Interior, eds. Inga
Bryden and Janet Floyd. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 103-120.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (New York: Penguin Books, 1892),
pp. 166-182.
Wednesday, Jan. 12: Abolition and domesticity
C. Midgley, “Slave Sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British antislavery culture,” Slavery and Abolition, 17:3 ,
Lynne Walker and Vron Ware, “Political Pincushions: Decorating the Abolitionist
Interior, 1787-1865.” In Domestic Space: Reading the nineteenth-century Interior, eds.
Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 58-83.
Monday, Jan. 18: MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY -- NO CLASS
Wednesday, Jan. 20: Suffrage, Imperialism, and Domesticity
Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914
(New York: Homes and Meier, 1980), ch. 3.
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Renate Bridenthal, “’Professional’ Housewives: Stepsisters of the Women’s Movement.”
In When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. Renate
Bridenthal, Atina Grossamn and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1984), pp. 154-173.
Antoinette Burton, "The Feminist Quest for Identity: British Imperial Suffragism and
'Global Sisterhood,' 1900-1915," Journal of Women's History 3, 2 (Fall, 1991): 46-81.
MAKE UP CLASS: SUNDAY JAN 24 (4:00-5:30)
Alternatives to the family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for
American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), ch. 3.
Margaret Birney Vickery, Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social
History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England. (Newark: Univ. of Delaware
Press, 1999), ch. 1.
Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), ch. 2.
Monday, Jan. 25: Homemaking and Sex Work
Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Naroibi, (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 1, 2, 6 and 9.
Wednesday, Jan. 27: Social Housekeeping: Settlement Houses
Despina Stratigakos, “The Architecture of Social Work: Workers’ Clubs, Social Welfare
Institutions and the Debate over Female Housing Inspectors,” ch. 5 in her A Women’s
Berlin: Building the Modern City, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp.
137-167.
Sharon Haar, “At Home in Public: The Hull House Settlement and the Study of the City.”
In Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy
Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 99-115.
Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, “Utopian Visions and Architectural Designs of Turn-of-theCentury Social Settlements.” In Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the
Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, (London:
Routledge, 2002), pp. 116-132.
Monday, Feb. 1: Breaking the Mould: Interwar Homes
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Susan R. Henderson, “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the
Frankfurt Kitchen.” in Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze,
and Carol Henderson, (New York: Princeton Archictectural Press, 1996), pp. 221-253.
Despina Stratigakos, “A Home of Our Own: Single Women and the New Domestic
Architecture,” ch. 3 in her A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City, (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 53-96.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).
Presentation, Group 2
Wednesday, Feb. 3: Gendered City living at the Movies
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, "The Great Reprieve: Modernity, Femininity, and the
Apartment," in her The Apartment Plot. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Betsey Klimasmith, At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and
Culture, 1850-1930, (Durham, New Hampshire: Univ. Press of New England, 2005), chs.
3 and 4.
Films: Carrie and Breakfast at Tiffany's
FILM SHOWING: TIME AND PLACE TBA
Monday, Feb. 7: 2nd Wave Feminist Takes on the Home
Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to
Do With It?” in Teresa de Laurentis, ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press), pp. 191-212.
Elizabeth Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling” in her Space, Time, and Perversion, (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) pp. 109-37.
Iris Marion Young “House and Home” in her On Female Body Experience, pp. 123-145.
Presentation, Group 3
Wednesday, Feb 9: 3rd wave and Marxist-Feminist Theorizations of Home
bell hooks , “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” pp. 41-50 and “Choosing the Margin as a
Space of Radical Openness” in her Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
(Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 145-154.
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Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman” in Linda Nicholson, ed. The Second Wave:
A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1981), pp. 265-271.
Gayle Rubin. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” in
Linda Nicholson, ed. The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1981).
Monday, Feb. 14: Screening of Ousbane Sembène, Black Girl (65 minutes)
Wednesday, Feb. 16: Living in other people’s homes: Domestic Service in the late
20th century
"Introduction"; Rachel Salazar Parreñas, "The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children
and Transnational Families int he New Gobal Economy," and Nicole Constable,
"Filipina Workers in Hong Kong Homes: Household Rules and Relations," in Barbara
Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex
Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003)
Film: Ousmane Sembene, Black Girl, 1966.
MAKE-UP CLASS: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20: 4:00-7:00.
Homebirthing/natural childbirth movement
This class will include a screening of Abby Epstein, The Business of Being Born (2008)
and pizza
Andrea O’Reilly, ed. Feminist Mothering. (Albany: SUNY Press: 2008), Part IV on
Activism, pp. 205-272.
Monday, Feb. 21: Gendered Homelessness
Janice Erlbaum, Girlbomb: A Halfway-Homeless Memoir (New York: Random House,
2006).
Presentation Group 4
Wednesday, Feb. 23: Queer Homes in Contemporary U.S., 1
Christopher Reed, “Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment,”
Art Journal, Vol. 55, No. 4, We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art
History (Winter, 1996), pp. 64-70.
Gordon Brent Ingram, “Fragments, Edges, and Matrices: Retheorizing the Formation of
a So-called Gay Ghetto through Queering Landscape Ecology” in Catriona MortimerSandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010), pp. 254-284.
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Wayne Myslik, “Renegotiating the Social/Sexual Identities of Places: Gay Communities
as Safe Haves or Sites of Resistance?” in American Queer: Now and Then, (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm Publishers, 1994), pp. 66-75.
Film: Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right, 2008.
Presentation Group 5
FILM SHOWING: TIME AND PLACE TBA
Monday, Feb. 28: Queer Homes in Contemporary U.S., 2
Judith Stacey and Elizabeth Davenport, “Queer Families Quack Back” in American
Queer: Now and Then in American Queer: Now and Then, (Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 1994), pp. 146-162.
Nancy G. Unger, “From Jook Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian
Alternative Environments in the United States” in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and
Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 2010). Pp. 173-198.
Bonnie J. Morries “At the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival” in American Queer: Now
and Then (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 1994), pp. 76-80.
Wednesday, March 2 : Alternative visions of Home in the 21st century: Adult
Children at home, Old Age homes....
Blog: -http://www.adultchildrenlivingathome.com/blog/
NYT Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthoodt.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
Iris Marion Young (1990). “A Room of One’s Own” in Throwing Like a Girl.
Presentation Group 6
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